Process and Product

6.  11th April 2011. Angela Rogers.
Visual Enquiry. Synchronous Seminar.

Process as verb/noun
Product as verb/noun


In the 18th and 19th centuries drawing was highly valued.
Skills appreciated. The product.


In 16th to 20th century, the primi pensieri, the first thoughts,
thus drawing as a verb was prized.


Mark Thompson. 1950.honeybees.
The process is not enough for art - must be integrated to artwork.
Bee beard. video. immersion.
Joseph Beys - material process. Social sculpture.
A house divided. 1989. before fall of Berlin wall.



Jeff Koons 1955.
I really don't believe in judgements - it could be looking at political systems, social hierarchies, and all these areas.
Michael Jackson and Bubbles 1988. Lifesize.
Art as product.
Was painter, then wall st commodity broker. He employed image consultant as artist.
Puppy 1992. giant. Guggebheim Bilboa.
There was an attempt to blow it up.
An acceptance of the mainstream, or horror of the modern world.


Francis Alys. 1959.
Sometimes making something leads to nothing. Sometimes making something leads to something. Modern flaneur.
Trail of paint - paradox of practice.



What is the relationship between process and product in your practice.


I am going to say inextricably interlinked, and yet of course there are separations. I think I work as a musical performance model - I rehearse, I go over and over, breaking down and doing slowly if needed, and then repeat over and over, hoping for that one take which has all the elements I can integrate into one session. I do not like to patch the best bits together into one best take - although I edit out alot. I will certainly keep in quick moments, spontaneous gestures, if they are right and they contribute to the whole. The product is finishes as much as it will ever be when I have completed all the auxiliary processing.


Most of my process is invisible - the thought process, the looking at, the judgements, which I document as indications to myself. That can never be even partly documented in full, as it would require micro examination of many collisions and conclusions in my mind.


And most of my process is behind the scenes private.



How do you conceptualise your studio/workspace.
What kind of processes and products does that suggest.



My studio is spread out over a few not ideal places. Over many years I have got used to temporary table tops, putting things away rather than leaving out, an internal studio or one that exists in my series of lists and notes to self. I have always been determined not to be compromised artistically by this, or lack of funding, space, time, etc. The process and product of my art is certainly informed by this. I know I make different work when I have a studio - more mechanical and bigger, but I take it philosophically, as the flow of life. If I cannot make sculpture I will take photographs or video, if I cannot afford film or printing I will draw, if I don't have the right drawing materials I will write. And so it goes.


I conceptualise my studio in term of time. Studio time. Time to think, to devote to thinking through work, to imagining and putting it all together. Time to think about what it really is deep inside myself I want to make a piece of work about, and about all the meanings I can draw into that. All the rest is details, enjoyable work, enjoyable frustration, enjoyable solution.


How much of your process do you want to reveal to an audience. 
As a viewer, how much process do you want to know.



I want to reveal the bare minimum of my process to the audience. If it is important to know something, as a help or key in being able to realise what they are seeing, I will try to integrate that into the title, or into the piece of writing I will present with the work. I hope within that to have enough bases covered. I really feel extremely uncomfortable in being asked questions about how I made something - increasingly uncomfortable. It seems pointless to me to say I layered films together, or that I walked very slowly, or waited for the right shadow to pass. It seems to me almost as a magician immediately revealing the trick, dispelling the illusion.


My works are not so illusionary, nor so dependent on technique, but it is really like asking a painter to explain why they put that particular shade of yellow there, and why next to that green. If I look at a painting, I may see a thick blob of colour, that cleverly reveals itself to be something else from a distance.


I know that in moving image / video art especially, the audience, and even some artists and curators, are used to asking such questions, and having them answered by artists. I need to rehearse my answers to questions, to stave off having to answer.



To what extent might artists working with process-based artwork be trying to avoid being commodified.

I don't really understand the question, because I think any artist may or may not try to avoid commodification no matter what they do.
The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that the premise of the question is wrong. If the artist's impulse is towards process based work, or towards a very product based practice, it still has to exist and be brought into existence by the artist.
If a product based practice has a deeper relationship with materials, then that must be accommodated, the materials must be found, paid for, transformed, dealt with, disseminated - commodified.
The process based artist may equally be involved in organisations, funding, and a network of corporations and commodification.
Any artist is free to give their work and their away, to reject any gallery or performance system. It is not collusion but exchange to join in to the human pursuits of living and culture.

Reflection

The seminar was beset by technical difficulties and curtailed. However, filling in the gaps, and imagining what Angela might have said, I think it is an interesting idea to swap around the nouns and verbs of art practice. When making work, there are definite times where I am aware that the art, the real moment, is in the process and moment. Perhaps in moving image it is the take which I have rehearsed, the take which has what I am looking for, what I intend.


There are some artists, like Marina Abramovic, who uses video and photography to record their art, as a medium of disseminating the moment of performance. I am aware of this, and think this way at times, but in my own practice, I then take that material as if it was paint or a palette, and create more from it.



14th April 2011